Sir James Chide was giving tea to a couple of guests at Lytchett Manor. It was a Saturday in late September. The beech-trees visible through the drawing-room windows were still untouched and heavily green; but their transformation was approaching. Soon, steeped in incredible splendors of orange and gold, they would stand upon the leaf-strewn grass, waiting for the night of rain or the touch of frost which should at last disrobe them.
"If you imagine, Miss Ettie," said Sir James, severely, to a young lady beside him, "that I place the smallest faith in any of Bobbie's remarks or protestations--"
The girl addressed smiled into his face, undaunted. She was a small elfish creature with a thin face, on the slenderest of necks. But in her queer little countenance a pair of laughing eyes, out of all proportion to the rest of her for loveliness and effect, gave her and kept her the attention of the world. They lent distinction--fascination even--to a character of simple virtues and girlish innocence.
Bobbie lounged behind her chair, his arms on the back of it. He took Sir James's attack upon him with calm. "Shall I show him the letter of my beastly chairman?" he said, in the girl's ear.
She nodded, and Bobbie drew from his breast-pocket a folded sheet of blue paper, and pompously handed it to Sir James.
The letter was from the chairman of a leading bank in Berlin--a man well known in European finance. It was couched in very civil terms, and contained the offer to Mr. Robert Forbes of a post in the Lindner bank, as an English correspondence clerk, at a salary in marks which, when translated, meant about £140 a year.
Sir James read it, and handed it back. "Well, what's the meaning of that?"
"I'm giving up the Foreign Office," said Bobbie, an engaging openness of manner. "It's not a proper place for a young man. I've learned nothing there but a game we do with Blue-Books, and things you throw at the ceiling--where they stick--I'll tell you about it presently. Besides, you see, I must have some money, and it don't grow in the Foreign Office for people like me. So I went to my uncle, Lord Forestier--"
"Of course!" growled Sir James. "I thought we should come to the uncles before long. Miss Wilson, I desire to warn you against marrying a young man of 'the classes.' They have no morals, but they have always uncles."
Miss Wilson's eyes shot laughter at herfiancé. "Go on, Bobbie, and don't make it too long!"
"I decline to be hustled." Bobbie's tone was firm, though urbane. "I repeat: I went to my uncle. And I said to him, like the unemployed: 'Find me work, and none of your d----d charity!'"
"Which means, I suppose, that the last time you went to him, you borrowed fifty pounds?" said Sir James.
"I shouldn't dream, sir, of betraying my uncle's affairs. On this occasion--for an uncle--he behaved well. He lectured me for twenty-seven minutes and a half--I had made up my mind beforehand not to let it go over the half-hour--and then he came to business. After a year's training and probation in Berlin he thought he could get me a post in his brother-in-law's place in the City. Awfully warm thing, you know," said Bobbie, complacently; "worth a little trouble. So I told him, kindly, I'd think of it. Ecco!" He pointed to the letter. "Of course, I told my uncle I should permit him to continue my allowance, and in a year I shall be a merchant prince--in the egg; I shall be worth marrying; and I shall allow Ettie two hundred a year for her clothes."
"And Lady Niton?"
Bobbie sat down abruptly; the girl stared at the carpet.
"I don't see the point of your remark," said Bobbie at last, with mildness. "When last I had the honor of hearing of her, Lady Niton was taking the air--or the waters--at Strathpeffer."
"As far as I know," remarked Sir James, "she is staying with the Feltons, five miles off, at this moment."
Bobbie whistled. "Close quarters!" He looked at Miss Ettie Wilson, and she at him. "May I ask whether, as soon as Ettie and I invited ourselves for the day, you asked Lady Niton to come to tea?"
"Not at all. I never play Providence unless I'm told to do so. Only Miss Mallory is coming to tea."
Bobbie expressed pleasure at the prospect; then his amiable countenance--the face of an "Idle Apprentice," whom no god has the heart to punish--sobered to a real concern as the association of ideas led him to inquire what the latest news might be of Oliver Marsham.
Sir James shook his head; his look clouded. He understood from Lady Lucy that Oliver was no better; the accounts, in fact, were very bad.
"Did they arrest anybody?" asked Bobbie.
"At Hartingfield? Yes--two lads. But there was not evidence enough to convict. They were both released, and the village gave them an ovation."
Bobbie hesitated.
"What do you think was the truth about that article?"
Sir James frowned and rose.
"Miss Wilson, come and see my garden. If you don't fall down and worship the peaches on my south wall, I shall not pursue your acquaintance."
It was a Saturday afternoon. Briefs were forgotten. The three strolled down the garden. Sir James, in a disreputable shooting-coat and cap, his hands deep in his pockets, took the middle of the path--the two lovers on either side. Chide made himself delightful to them. On that Italian journey of which he constantly thought, Ferrier had been amused and cheered all through by Bobbie's nonsense; and the young fellow had loyally felt his death--and shown it. Chide's friendly eye would be on him and his Ettie henceforward.
Five or ten minutes afterward, a brougham drove up to the door of Lytchett, and a small lady emerged. She had rung the bell, and was waiting on the steps, when a pony-carriage also turned into the Lytchett avenue and drew near rapidly.
A girl in a shady hat was driving it.
"The very creature!" cried Lady Niton, under her breath, smartly tapping her tiny boot with the black cane she carried, and referring apparently to some train of meditation in which she had been just engaged. She waved to her own coachman to be off, and stood awaiting Diana.
"Sir James made himself delightful to them"
"How do you do, Miss Mallory? Are you invited? I'm not."
Diana descended, and they shook hands. They had not met since the evening at Tallyn when Diana, in her fresh beauty, had been the gleaming princess, and Lady Niton the friendly godmother, of so promising a fairy tale. The old woman looked at her curiously, as they stood in the drawing-room together, while the footman went off to find Sir James. Frail--dark lines under the eyes--a look as of long endurance--a smile that was a mere shield and concealment for the heart beneath--alack!
And there was no comfort to be got out of calling down fire from heaven on the author of this change, since it had fallen so abundantly already!
"Sit down; you look tired," said the old lady, in her piping, peremptory voice. "Have you been here all the summer?"
"Yes--since June."
"Through the election?"
"Yes." Diana turned her face away. Lady Niton could see the extreme delicacy to which the profile had fined down, the bluish or purple shadows here and there on the white skin. Something glittered in the old woman's eyes. She put out a hand from the queer flounced mantle, made out of an ancient evening dress, in which she was arrayed, and touched Diana's.
"You know--you've heard--about those poor things at Tallyn?"
Diana made a quick movement. Her eyes were on the speaker.
"How is Mr. Marsham?"
Lady Niton shook her head. She opened a hand-bag on her wrist, took out a letter, and put on her eye-glasses.
"This is Lucy--arrived this morning. It don't sound well. 'Come when you can, my dear Elizabeth--you will be very welcome. But I do not know how I have the courage to ask you. We are a depressing pair, Oliver and I. Oliver has been in almost constant pain this last week. If it goes on we must try morphia. But before that we shall see another doctor. I dread to think of morphia. Once begin it, and what will be the end? I sit here alone a great deal--thinking. How long did that stone take to throw?--a few seconds, perhaps? And here is my son--my poor son!--broken and helpless--perhaps for life. We have been trying a secretary to write for him and read to him, for the blindness increases, but it has not been a success.'"
Diana rose abruptly and walked to the window, where she stood, motionless--looking out--her back turned to Lady Niton. Her companion glanced at her--lifted her eyebrows--hesitated--and finally put the letter back into her pocket. There was an awkward silence, when Diana suddenly returned to Lady Niton's side.
"Where is Miss Drake?" she said, sharply. "Is the marriage put off?"
"Marriage!" Lady Niton laughed. "Alicia and Oliver? H'm. I don't think we shall hear much more of that!"
"I thought it was settled."
"Well, as soon as I heard of the accident and Oliver's condition, I wondered to myself how long that young woman would keep it up. I have no doubt the situation gave her a disturbed night or two, Alicia never can have had: the smallest intention of spending her life, or the best years of it, in nursing a sick husband. On the other hand, money is money. So she went off to the Treshams', to see if there was no third course--that's how I read it."
"The Treshams'?--a visit?--since the accident?"
"Don't look so astonished, my dear. You don't know the Alicias of this world. But I admit we should be dull without them. There's a girl at the Feltons' who has just come down from the Treshams', and I wouldn't have missed her stories of Alicia for a great deal. She's been setting her cap, it appears, at Lord Philip. However" (Lady Niton chuckled) "thereshe's met her match."
"Rut theyareengaged?" said Diana, in bewildered interrogation.
The little lady's laugh rang out--shrill and cracked--like the crow of a bantam.
"She and Lord Philip? Trust Lord Philip!"
"No, I didn't mean that!"
"She and Oliver? I've no doubt Oliver thinks--or thought--they were. What view he takes now, poor fellow, I'm sure I don't know. But I don't somehow think Alicia will be able to carry on the game indefinitely. Lady Lucy is losing patience."
Diana sat in silence. Lady Niton could not exactly decipher her. But she guessed at a conflict between a scrupulous or proud unwillingness to discuss the matter at all or hear it discussed, and some motive deeper still and more imperative.
"Lady Lucy has been ill too?" Diana inquired at last, in the same voice of constraint.
"Oh, very unwell indeed. A poor, broken thing! And there don't seem to be anybody to look after them. Mrs. Fotheringham is about as much good as a broomstick. Every family ought to keep a supply of superfluous girls. They're like the army--useless in peace and indispensable in war. Ha! here's Sir James."
Both ladies perceived Sir James, coming briskly up the garden path. As she saw him a thought struck Diana--a thought which concerned Lady Niton. It broke down the tension of her look, and there was the gleam of a smile--sad still, and touching--in the glance she threw at her companion. She had been asked to tea to meet a couple of guests from London with whose affairs she was well acquainted; and she too thought Sir James had been playing Providence.
Sir James, evidently conscious, saw the raillery in her face, pinched her fingers as she gave him her hand, and Diana, passing him, escaped to the garden, very certain that she should find the couple in question somewhere among its shades.
Lady Niton examined Sir James--looked after Diana.
"Look here!" she said, abruptly; "what's up? You two understand something I don't. Out with it!"
Sir James, who could always blush like a girl, blushed.
"I vow that I am as innocent as a babe unborn!"
"What of?" The tone of the demand was like that of a sword in the drawing.
"I have some guests here to-day."
"Who are they?"
"A young man you know--a young woman you would like to know."
Silence. Lady Niton sat down again.
"Kindly ring the bell," she said, lifting a peremptory hand, "and send for my carriage."
"Let me parley an instant," said Sir James, moving between her and the bell. "Bobbie is just off to Berlin. Won't you say good-bye to him?"
"Mr. Forbes's movements are entirely indifferent to me--ring!" Then, shrill-voiced--and with sudden fury, like a bird ruffling up: "Berlin, indeed! More waste--more shirking! He needn't come to me! I won't give him another penny."
"I don't advise you to offer it," said Sir James, with suavity. "Bobbie has got a post in Berlin through his uncle, and is going off for a twelvemonth to learn banking."
Lady Niton sat blinking and speechless. Sir James drew the muslin curtain back from the window.
"There they are, you see--Bobbie--and the Explanation. And if you ask me, I think the Explanation explains."
Lady Niton put up her gold-rimmed glasses.
"She is not in the least pretty!" she said, with hasty venom, her old hand shaking.
"No, but fetching--and a good girl. She worships her Bobbie, and she's sending him away for a year."
"I won't allow it!" cried Lady Niton. "He sha'n't go."
Sir James shrugged his shoulders.
"These are domestic brawls--I decline them. Ah!" He turned to the window, opening it wide. She did not move. He made a sign, and two of the three persons who had just appeared on the lawn came running toward the house. Diana loitered behind.
Lady Niton looked at the two young faces as they reached her side--the mingling of laughter and anxiety in the girl's, of pride and embarrassment in Bobbie's.
"You sha'n't go to Berlin!" she said to him, vehemently, as she just allowed him to take her hand.
"Dear Lady Niton!--I must."
"You sha'n't!--I tell you! I've got you a place in London--a, thousand times, better than your fool of an uncle could ever get you. Uncle, indeed! Read that letter!" She tossed him one from her bag.
Bobbie read, while Lady Niton stared hard at the girl. Presently Bobbie began to gasp.
"Well, upon my word!"--he put the letter down--"upon my word!"' He turned to his sweetheart. "Ettie!--you marry me in a month!--mind that! Hang Berlin! I scorn their mean proposals. London requires me." He drew himself up. "But first" (he looked at Lady Niton, his flushed face twitching a little) "justice!" he said, peremptorily--"justice on the chief offender."
And walking across to her, he stooped and kissed her. Then he beckoned to Ettie to do the same. Very shyly the girl ventured; very stoically the victim, submitted. Whereupon, Bobbie subsided, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and a violent quarrel began immediately between him and Lady Niton on the subject of the part of London in which he and Ettie were to live. Fiercely the conflict waxed and waned, while the young girl's soft irrepressible laughter filled up all the gaps and like a rushing stream carried away the detritus--the tempers and rancors and scorns--left by former convulsions.
Meanwhile, Diana and Sir James paced the garden. He saw that she was silent and absent-minded, and guessed uneasily at the cause. It was impossible that any woman of her type, who had gone through the experience that she had, should remain unmoved by the accounts now current as to Oliver Marsham's state.
As they returned across the lawn to the house the two lovers came out to meet them. Sir James saw the look with which Diana watched them coming. It seemed to him one of the sweetest and one of the most piteous he had ever seen on a human face.
"I shall descend upon you next week," said Lady Niton abruptly, as Diana made her farewells. "I shall be at Tallyn."
Diana did not reply. The littlefiancéeinsisted on the right to take her to her pony-carriage, and kissed her tenderly before she let her go. Diana had already become as a sister to her and Bobbie, trusted in their secrets and advising in their affairs.
Lady Niton, standing by Sir James, looked after her.
"Well, there's only one thing in the world that girl wants; and I suppose nobody in their senses ought to help her to it."
"What do you mean?"
She murmured a few words in his ear.
"Not a bit of it!" said Sir James, violently. "I forbid it. Don't you go and put anything of the sort into her head. The young man I mean her to marry comes back from Nigeria this very day."
"She won't marry him!"
"We shall see."
Diana drove home through lanes suffused with sunset and rich with autumn. There had been much rain through September, and the deluged earth steamed under the return of the sun. Mists were rising from the stubbles, and wrapping the woods in sleep and purple. To her the beauty of it all was of a mask or pageant--seen from a distance across a plain or through a street-opening--lovely and remote. All that was real--all that lived--was the image within the mind; not the great earth-show without.
As she passed through the village she fell in with the Roughsedges: the doctor, with his wide-awake on the back of his head, a book and a bulging umbrella under his arm; Mrs. Roughsedge, in a new shawl, and new bonnet-strings, with a prodigal flutter of side curls beside her ample countenance. Hugh, it appeared, was expected by an evening train. Diana begged that he might be brought up to see her some time in the course of the following afternoon. Then she drove on, and Mrs. Roughsedge was left staring discontentedly at her husband.
"I think shewasglad, Henry?"
"Think it, my dear, if it does you any good," said the doctor, cheerfully.
When Diana reached home night had fallen--a moon-lit night, through which all the shapes and even the colors of day were still to be seen or divined in a softened and pearly mystery. Muriel Colwood was not at home. She had gone to town, on one of her rare absences, to meet some relations. Diana missed her, and yet was conscious that even the watch of those kind eyes would--to-night--have added to the passionate torment of thought.
As she sat alone in the drawing-room after her short and solitary meal her nature bent and trembled under the blowing of those winds of fate, which, like gusts among autumn trees, have tested or strained or despoiled the frail single life since time began; winds of love and pity, of desire and memory, of anguish and of longing.
Only her dog kept her company. Sometimes she rose out of restlessness, and moved about the room, and the dog's eyes would follow her, dumbly dependent. The room was dimly lit; in the mirrors she saw now and then the ghostly passage of some one who seemed herself and not herself. The windows were open to a misty garden, waiting for moonrise; in the house all was silence; only from the distant road and village came voices sometimes of children, or the sounds of a barrel-organ, fragmentary and shrill.
Loneliness ached in her heart--spoke to her from the future. And five miles away Oliver, too, was lonely--and in pain.Pain!--the thought of it, as of something embodied and devilish, clutching and tearing at a man already crushed and helpless--gave her no respite. The tears ran down her cheeks as she moved to and fro, her hands at her breast.
Yet she was helpless. What could she do? Even if he were free from Alicia, even if he wished to recall her, how could he--maimed and broken--take the steps that could alone bring her to his side? If their engagement had subsisted, horror, catastrophe, the approach of death itself, could have done nothing to part them. Now, how was a man in such a plight to ask from a woman what yet the woman would pay a universe to give? And in the face of the man's silence, how could the woman speak?
No!--she began to see her life as the Vicar saw it: pledged to large causes, given to drudgeries--necessary, perhaps noble, for which the happy are not meant. This quiet shelter of Beechcote could not be hers much longer. If she was not to go to Oliver, impossible that she could live on in this rose-scented stillness of the old house and garden, surrounded by comfort, tranquillity, beauty, while the agony of the world rang in her ears--wild voices!--speaking universal, terrible, representative things, yet in tones piteously dear and familiar, close, close to her heart. No; like Marion Vincent, she must take her life in her hands, offering it day by day to this hungry human need, not stopping to think, accepting the first task to her hand, doing it as she best could. Only so could she still her own misery; tame, silence her own grief; grief first and above all for Oliver, grief for her own youth, grief for her parents. She must turn to the poor in that mood she had in the first instance refused to allow the growth of in herself--the mood of one seeking an opiate, an anæsthetic. The scrubbing of hospital floors; the pacing of dreary streets on mechanical errands; the humblest obedience and routine; things that must be done, and in the doing of them deaden thought--these were what she turned to as the only means by which life could be lived.
Oliver!--No hope for him?--at thirty-six! His career broken--his ambition defeated. Nothing before him but the decline of power and joy; nights of barren endurance, separating days empty and tortured; all natural pleasures deadened and destroyed; the dying down of all the hopes and energies that make a man.
She threw herself down beside the open window, burying her face on her knees. Would they never let her go to him?--never let her say to him: "Oliver, take me!--you did love me once--what matters what came between us? That was in another world. Take my life--crush out of it any drop of comfort or of ease it can give you! Cruel, cruel--to refuse! It is mine to give and yours to spend!"
Juliet Sparling's daughter. There was the great consecrating, liberating fact! What claim had she to the ordinary human joys? What could the ordinary standards and expectations of life demand from her? Nothing!--nothing that could stem this rush of the heart to the beloved--the forsaken and suffering and overshadowed beloved. Her future?--she held it dross--apart from Oliver. Dear Sir James!--but he must learn to bear it--to admit that she stood alone, and must judge for herself. What possible bliss or reward could there ever be for her but just this: to be allowed to watch and suffer with Oliver--to bring him the invention, the patience, the healing divination of love? And if it were not to be hers, then what remained was to go down into the arena, where all that is ugliest and most piteous in life bleeds and gasps, and throw herself blindly into the fight. Perhaps some heavenly voice might still speak through it; perhaps, beyond its jar, some ineffable reunion might dawn--
"First a peace out of pain--then a light--then thy breast!..."
She trembled through and through. Restraining herself, she rose, and went to her locked desk, taking from it the closely written journal of her father's life, which had now been for months the companion of her thoughts, and of the many lonely moments in her days and nights. She opened on a passage tragically familiar to her:
"It is an April day. Everything is very still and balmy. clouds are low, yet suffused with sun. They seem to be tangled among the olives, and all the spring green and flowering fruit trees are like embroidery on a dim yet shining background of haze, silvery and glistening in the sun, blue and purple in the shadows. The beach-trees in the olive garden throw up their pink spray among the shimmering gray leaf and beside the gray stone walls. Warm breaths steal to me over the grass and through the trees; the last brought with it a strong scent of narcissus. A goat tethered to a young tree in the orchard has reared its front feet against the stem, and is nibbling at the branches. His white back shines amid the light spring shade."Far down through the trees I can see the sparkle of the waves--beyond, the broad plain of blue; and on the headland, a mile away, white foam is dashing."It is the typical landscape of the South, and of spring, the landscape, with only differences in detail, of Theocritus or Vergil, or the Greek anthologists, those most delicate singers of nature and the South. From the beginning it has filled man with the same joy, the same yearning, the same despair."In youth and happiness wearethe spring--the young green--the blossom--the plashing waves. Their life is ours and one with ours."But in age and grief? There is no resentment, I think; no anger, as though a mourner resented the gayety around him; but, rather, a deep and melancholy wonder at the chasm that has now revealed itself between our life and nature. What does the breach mean?--the incurable dissonance and alienation? Are we greater than nature, or less? Is the opposition final, the prophecy of man's ultimate and hopeless defeat at the hands of nature?--or is it, in the Hegelian sense, the mere development of a necessary conflict, leading to a profounder and intenser unity? The old, old questions--stock possessions of the race, yet burned anew by life into the blood and brain of the individual."I see Diana in the garden with her nurse. She has been running to and fro, playing with the dog, feeding the goat. Now I see her sitting still, her chin on her hands, looking out to sea. She seems to droop; but I am sure she is not tired. It is an attitude not very natural to a child, especially to a child so full of physical health and vigor; yet she often falls into it."When I see it I am filled with dread. She knows nothing, yet the cloud seems to be upon her. Does she already ask herself questions--about her father--about this solitary life?"Juliet was not herself--not in her full sane mind--when I promised her. That I know. But I could no more have refused the promise than water to her dying lips. One awful evening of fever and hallucination I had been sitting by her for a long time. Her thoughts, poor sufferer, had been full ofblood--it is hard to write it--but there is the truth--a physical horror of blood--the blood in which her dress--the dress they took from her, her first night in prison--was once steeped. She saw it everywhere, on her hands, the sheets, the walls; it was a nausea, an agony of brain and flesh; and yet it was, of course, but a mere symbol and shadow of the manifold agony she had gone through. I will not attempt to describe what I felt--what the man who knows that his neglect and selfishness drove her the first steps along this infernal road must feel to his last hour.--But at last we were able--the nurse and I--to soothe her a little. The nightmare lifted, we gave her food, and the nurse brushed her poor brown hair, and tied round it, loosely, the little black scarf she likes to wear. We lifted her on her pillows, and her white face grew calm, and so lovely--though, as we thought, very near to death. Her hair, which was cut in prison, had grown again a little--to her neck, and could not help curling. It made her look a child again--poor, piteous child!--so did the little scarf, tied under her chin--and the tiny proportions to which all her frame had shrunk."She lifted her face to mine, as I bent over her, kissed me, and asked for you. You were brought, and I took you on my knee, showing you pictures, to keep you quiet. But every other minute, almost, your eyes looked away from the book to her, with that grave considering look, as though a question were behind the look, to which your little brain could not yet give shape. My strange impression was that the question was there--in the mind--fully formed, like the Platonic 'ideas' in heaven; but that, physically, there was no power to make the word-copy that could have alone communicated it to us. Your mother looked at you in return, intently--quite still. When you began to get restless, I lifted you up to kiss her; you were startled, perhaps, by the cold of her face, and struggled away. A little color came into her cheeks; she followed you hungrily with her eyes as you were carried off; then she signed to me, and it was my hand that brushed away her tears."Immediately afterward she began to speak, with wonderful will and self-control, and she asked me that till you were grown up and knowledge became inevitable, I should tell you nothing. There was to be no talk of her, no picture of her, no letters. As far as possible, during your childhood and youth, she was to be to you as though she had never existed. What her thought was exactly she was too feeble to explain; nor was her mind strong enough to envisage all the consequences--to me, as well as to you--of what she proposed. No doubt it tortured her to think of you as growing up under the cloud of her name and fate, and with her natural and tragic impetuosity she asked what she did."'One day--there will come some one--who will love her--in spite of me. Then you and he--shall tell her.'"I pointed out to her that such a course would mean that I must change my name and live abroad. Her eyes assented, with a look of relief. She knew that I had already developed the tastes of the nomad and the sun-worshipper, that I was a student, happy in books and solitude; and I have no doubt that the picture her mind formed at the moment of some such hidden life together, as we have actually led, you and I, since her death, soothed and consoled her. With her intense and poetic imagination, she knew well what had happened to us, as well as to herself."So here we are in this hermitage; and except in a few passing perfunctory words, I have never spoken to you of her. Whether what I have done is wise I cannot tell. I could not help it; and if I had broken my word, remorse would have killed me. I shall not die, however, without telling you--if only I have warning enough."But supposing there is no warning--then all that I write now, and much else, will be in your hands some day. There are moments when I feel a rush of comfort at the notion that I may never have to watch your face as you hear the story; there are others when the longing to hold you--child as you still are--against my heart, and feel your tears--your tears for her--mingling with mine, almost sweeps me off my feet."And when you grow older my task in all its aspects will be harder still. You have inherited her beauty on a larger, ampler scale, and the time will come for lovers. You will hear of your mother then for the first time; my mind trembles even now at the thought of it. For the story may work out ill, or well, in a hundred different ways; and what we did in love may one day be seen as an error and folly, avenging itself not on us, but on our child."Nevertheless, my Diana, if it had to be done again, it must still be done. Your mother, before she died, was tortured by no common pains of body and spirit. Yet she never thought of herself--she was tormented for us. If her vision was clouded, her prayer unwise--in that hour, no argument, no resistance was possible."The man who loves you will love you well, my child. You are not made to be lightly or faithlessly loved. He will carry you through the passage perilous if I am no longer there to help. To him--in the distant years--I commit you. On him be my blessing, and the blessing, too, of that poor ghost whose hands I seem to hold in mine as I write. Let him not be too proud to take it!"
Diana put down the book with a low sob that sounded through the quiet room. Then she opened the garden door and stepped on to the terrace. The night was cold but not frosty; there was a waning moon above the autumnal fulness of the garden and the woods.
A "spirit in her feet" impelled her. She went back to the house, found a cloak and hat, put out the lamps, and sent the servants to bed. Then noiselessly she once more undid the drawing-room door, and stole out into the garden and across the lawn. Soon she was in the lime-walk, the first yellow leaves crackling beneath her feet; then in the kitchen garden, where the apples shone dimly on the laden boughs, where sunflowers and dahlias and marigolds, tall white daisies and late roses--the ghosts of their daylight selves--dreamed and drooped under the moon; where the bees slept and only great moths were abroad. And so on to the climbing path and the hollows of the down. She walked quickly along the edge of it, through hanging woods of beech that clothed the hill-side. Sometimes the trees met in majestic darkness above her head, and the path was a glimmering mystery before her. Sometimes the ground broke away on her left--abruptly--in great chasms, torn from the hill-side, stripped of trees, and open to the stars. Down rushed the steep slopes to the plain, clad in the decaying leaf and mast of former years, and at the edges of these precipitous glades, or scattered at long intervals across them, great single trees emerged, the types and masters of the forest, their trunks, incomparably tall, and all their noble limbs, now thinly veiled by a departing leafage, drawn sharp, in black and silver, on the pale background of the chalk plain. Nothing so grandiose as these climbing beech woods of middle England!--by day, as it were, some vast procession marching joyously over hill and dale to the music of the birds and the wind; and at night, a brooding host, silent yet animate, waiting the signal of the dawn.
Diana passed through them, drinking in the exaltation of their silence and their strength, yet driven on by the mere weakness and foolishness of love. By following the curve of the down she could reach a point on the hill-side whence, on a rising ground to the north, Tallyn was visible. She hastened thither through the night. Once she was startled by a shot fired from a plantation near the path, trees began to rustle and dogs to bark, and she fled on, in terror lest the Tallyn keepers might discover her. Alack!--for whose pleasure were they watching now?
The trees fell back. She reached the bare shoulder of the down. Northward and eastward spread the plain; and on the low hill in front her eyes discerned the pale patch of Tallyn, flanked by the darkness of the woods. And in that dim front, a light--surely a light?--in an upper window. She sank down in a hollow of the chalk, her eyes upon the house, murmuring and weeping.
So she watched with Oliver, as once--at the moment of her sharpest pain--he had watched with her. But whereas in that earlier night everything was in the man's hands to will or to do, the woman felt herself now helpless and impotent. His wealth, his mother hedged him from her. And if not, he had forgotten her altogether for Alicia; he cared for her no more; it would merely add to his burden to be reminded of her. As to Alicia--the girl who could cruelly leave him there, in that house of torture, to go and dance and amuse herself--leave him in his pain, his mother in her sorrow--Diana's whole being was shaken first with an anguish of resentful scorn, in which everything personal to herself disappeared. Then--by an immediate revulsion--the thought of Alicia was a thought of deliverance. Gone?--gone from between them?--the flaunting, triumphant, heartless face?
Suddenly it seemed to Diana that she was there beside him, in the darkened room--that he heard her, and looked up.
"Diana!"
"Oliver!" She knelt beside him--she raised his head on her breast--she whispered to him; and at last he slept. Then hostile forms crowded about her, forbidding her, driving her away--even Sir James Chide--in the name of her own youth. And she heard her own answer: "Dear friend!--think!--remember! Let me stay!--let me stay! Am I not the child of sorrow? Here is my natural place--my only joy."
And she broke down into bitter helpless tears, pleading, it seemed, with things and persons inexorable.
Meanwhile, in Beechcote village, that night, a man slept lightly, thinking of Diana. Hugh Roughsedge, bronzed and full of honors, a man developed and matured, with the future in his hands, had returned that afternoon to his old home.
"How is she?"
Mrs. Colwood shook her head sadly.
"Not well--and not happy."
The questioner was Hugh Roughsedge. The young soldier had walked up to Beechcote immediately after luncheon, finding it impossible to restrain his impatience longer. Diana had not expected him so soon, and had slipped out for her daily half-hour with Betty Dyson, who had had a slight stroke, and was failing fast. So that Mrs. Colwood was at Roughsedge's discretion. But he was not taking all the advantage of it that he might have done. The questions with which his mind was evidently teeming came out but slowly.
Little Mrs. Colwood surveyed him from time to time with sympathy and pleasure. Her round child-like eyes under their long lashes told her everything that as a woman she wanted to know. What an improvement in looks and manner--what indefinable gains in significance and self-possession! Danger, command, responsibility, those great tutors of men, had come in upon the solid yet malleable stuff of which the character was made, moulding and polishing, striking away defects, disengaging and accenting qualities. Who could ever have foreseen that Hugh might some day be described as "a man of the world"? Yet if that vague phrase were to be taken in its best sense, as describing a personality both tempered and refined by the play of the world's forces upon it, it might certainly be now used of the man before her.
He was handsomer than ever; bronzed by Nigerian sun, all the superfluous flesh marched off him; every muscle in his frame taut and vigorous. And at the same time a new self-confidence--apparently quite unconscious, and the inevitable result of a strong and testing experience--was enabling him to bring his powers to bear and into play, as he had never yet done.
She recalled, with some confusion, that she--and Diana?--had tacitly thought of him as good, but stupid. On the contrary, was she, perhaps, in the presence of some one destined to do great things for his country? to lay hold--without intending it, as it were, and by the left hand--oh high distinction? Were women, on the whole, bad judges of young men? She recalled a saying of Dr. Roughsedge, that "mothers never know how clever their sons are." Perhaps the blindness extends to other eyes than mothers?
Meanwhile, she got from him all the news she could. He had been, it seemed, concerned in the vast operation of bringing a new African Empire into being. She listened, dazzled, while in the very simplest, baldest phrases he described the curbing of slave-raiders, the winning of populations, the grappling with the desert, the opening out of river highways, whereof in his seven months he had been the fascinated beholder. As to his own exploits, he was ingeniously silent; but she knew them already. A military expedition against two revolted and slave-raiding emirs, holding strong positions on the great river; a few officers borrowed from home to stiffen a local militia; hot fighting against great odds; half a million of men released from a reign of hell; tyranny broken, and the Britishpaxextended over regions a third as large as India--smiling prosperity within its pale, bestial devastation and cruelty without--these things she knew, or had been able to imagine from the newspapers. According to him, it had been all the doing of other men. She knew better; but soon found it of no use to interrupt him.
Meanwhile she dared not ask him why he had come home. The campaign, indeed, was over; but he had been offered, it appeared, an administrative appointment.
"And you mean to go back?"
"Perhaps." He colored and looked restlessly out of the window.
Mrs. Colwood understood the look, and felt it was, indeed, hard upon him that he must put up with her so long. In reality, he too was conscious of new pleasure in an old acquaintance. He had forgotten what a dear little thing she was: how prettily round-faced, yet delicate--ethereal--in all her proportions, with the kindest eyes. She too had grown--by the mere contact with Diana's fate. Within her tiny frame the soul of her had risen to maternal heights, embracing and sustaining Diana.
He would have given the world to question her. But after her first answer to his first inquiry he had fallen tongue-tied on the subject of Diana, and Nigeria had absorbed conversation. She, on her side, wished him to know many things, but did not see how to begin upon them.
At last she attempted it.
"You have heard of our election? And what happened?"
He nodded. His mother had kept him informed. He understood Marsham had been badly hurt. Was it really so desperate?
In a cautious voice, watching the window, Muriel told what she knew. The recital was pitiful; but Hugh Roughsedge sat impassive, making no comments. She felt that in this quarter the young man was adamant.
"I suppose"--he turned his face from her--"Miss Mallory does not now go to Tallyn."
"No." She hesitated, looking at her companion, a score of feelings mingling in her mind. Then she broke out: "But she would like to!"
His startled look met hers; she was dismayed at what she had done. Yet, how not to give him warning?--this loyal young fellow, feeding himself on futile hopes!
"You mean--she still thinks--of Marsham?"
"Of nothing else," she said, impetuously--"of nothing else!"
He frowned and winced.
She resumed: "It is like her--so like her!--isn't it?"
Her soft pitiful eyes, into which the tears had sprung, pressed the question on him.
"I thought there was a cousin--Miss Drake?" he said, roughly.
Mrs. Colwood hesitated.
"It is said that all that is broken off."
He was silent. But his watch was on the garden. And suddenly, on the long grass path, Diana appeared, side by side with the Vicar. Roughsedge sprang up. Muriel was arrested by Diana's face, and by something rigid in the carriage of the head. What had the Vicar been saying to her?--she asked herself, angrily. Never was there anything less discreet than the Vicar's handling of human nature!--female human nature, in particular.
Hugh Roughsedge opened the glass door, and went to meet them. Diana, at sight of him, gave a bewildered look, as though she scarcely knew him--then a perfunctory hand.
"Captain Roughsedge! They didn't tell me--"
"I want to speak to you," said the Vicar, peremptorily, to Mrs. Colwood; and he carried her off round the corner of the house.
Diana gazed after them, and Roughsedge thought he saw her totter.
"You look so ill!" he said, stooping over her. "Come and sit down."
His boyish nervousness and timidity left him. The strong man emerged and took command. He guided her to a garden seat, under a drooping lime. She sank upon the seat, quite unable to stand, beckoning him to stay by her. So he stood near, reluctantly waiting, his heart contracting at the sight of her.
At last she recovered herself and sat up.
"It was some bad news," she said, looking at him piteously, and holding out her hand again. "It is too bad of me to greet you like this."
He took her hand, and his own self-control broke down. He raised it to his lips with a stifled cry.
"Don't!--don't!" said Diana, helplessly. "Indeed--there is nothing the matter--I am only foolish. It is so--so good of you to care." She drew her hand from his, raised it to her brow, and, drawing a long breath, pushed back the hair from her face. She was like a person struggling against some torturing restraint, not knowing where to turn for help.